Dive into HTML5… on HTML5 Doctor

Last week, we were surprised and saddened when Mark Pilgrim, long time educator, raconteur, and writer of note, decided to retire from the internet. Unfortunately, he also decided to 410: gone all of his writing, including Dive into HTML5.

Mark provided this book for free on the web (under a Creative Commons By 3.0 license), in addition to a published, for-sale version entitled HTML5: Up and Running from O’Reilly. This is a very unusual setup, but one we’ve collectively benefitted from. Many HTML5 Doctor articles feature links to this book, and the sudden loss of this valuable resource was a little shocking.

The interwebs soon mobilised, however, and now there are several copies of this book, including:

Jonathan Neal is coordinating diveintohtml5.info and diveinto.org, and has added the following to the book’s title page:

Mark Pilgrim has stopped maintaining this project, and we want it to continue. We’re not just patching broken links and updating APIs. We plan to actively maintain it; refreshing, updating, and reflecting the relevant and current state of HTML5, just as it had been during Mark’s tenure.

We doctors feel the same way and plan to help keep the book updated. To that end, we’ve set up a mirror at diveinto.html5doctor.com, and we’ll be experimenting with using GitHub to contribute.

We’d like to publicly thank Mark Pilgrim for both writing this wonderful reference on HTML5 (and all his other writing over the years), and for making Dive into HTML5 available under a CC-By license that makes it possible for us to mirror it here. We’re interested to see where this brave new world of distributed community editing collectively takes us, and we invite you to pitch in.